


Summer Camp

by RoyGoodeRoyGreat



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Camp Green Lake, Fluff, Nonsense, Post-Five Year Mission, Pranks, Summer Camp, omgcprb, so much nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 21:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18979075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoyGoodeRoyGreat/pseuds/RoyGoodeRoyGreat
Summary: Shitty and Lardo decide to end Shitty's Samwell career with a bang by signing up to be camp counselors.





	Summer Camp

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to operaluva823 for being an amazing beta!

“‘Let’s be camp counselors,’ he said,” Lardo muttered to herself as she stooped to crawl under the fallen tree. She managed to squeeze herself through the small gap between the log and the rock it rested on only to get a face full of spider web. Gagging and sputtering, she wiped her face on the sleeve of her t-shirt. 

 

“‘It’ll be fun,’ he said,” she hissed. She braced her weight on the palms of her hands and tried to drag her body the rest of the way through the opening. Her momentum was stopped when some unseen piece of bark snagged in her back pocket and threatened to rip her shorts right off. Groaning, Lardo flopped down in the dirt, resting her forehead on the back of her hand. 

 

“We’ll get to chill by a lake and hang out before I have to go back to Harvard. And we can totally smoke once the kids go to bed,” Lardo continued in her shitty impression of, well, Shitty. The summer so far had not been ‘chill’ at all. Sure there was a lake, and yes, there were kids, he’d gotten those parts right, at least. But they were counselors for different cabins and only got to “hang out” when their campers were doing the same activities. Even then, they definitely had to spend more time actually watching the kids (ugh) than talking to each other. And they had not smoked. Anything. At all. It was probably the longest stretch of time either of them had been sober since the first time they’d tried anything. 

 

Lardo rolled carefully onto her side and reached back to unhook her pants from the log. Once she was free, she shimmied her way forward, popping up to a crouch when she was sure she was no longer underneath the log. Standing, she brushed the dirt and leaves and god knows what else off her front, frowning at the stains left behind. Why Camp Green Lake had chosen white t-shirts for their counselors was beyond her. Why they’d settled on the name “Camp Green Lake” was also a mystery. They were at Lake Ashmere and, to her knowledge, none of the campers were child convicts from Texas. 

 

She took a deep breath and blew it out her mouth, sending an errant lock of hair flying back into place. Planting her hands on her hips, Lardo surveyed the clearing where she had found herself. The otherwise crowded mass of trees opened up just enough to create a secluded hideaway just inside the edge of the tree line. She could still hear the campers shouting behind her, but a quick glance over her shoulder let her know that she couldn’t see them—nor could they see her. Lardo took a few steps forward into the middle of the copse of trees, then squatted to hunt for her bounty. She peered under bushes and behind rocks, growing more and more impatient with herself with each passing second. Then—aha! There it was, the sneaky little fucker. 

 

Dropping to her hands and knees once more, Lardo stretched her hand out under the bush. She brushed the smooth surface of the volleyball with the very tips of her fingers, but couldn’t get any purchase on it. Grunting with frustration, she shuffled forward and tried again. The low branches of the bush scraped against her arm and the back of her hand, but she managed to roll the ball out from its hiding place. Grabbing her prize triumphantly, she sat back on her heels and tossed the ball lightly in the air, catching it easily in one dirty palm.

 

“Lards!” Shitty’s voice cut through the relative peace of the clearing, giving Lardo a start. She ought to be used to it by now, what with hanging around the Haus for three years and now working at a summer camp for four weeks. “Did you get lost?”

 

Rolling her eyes, Lardo stood up, still holding the ball in one hand. “I got it,” she droned, not bothering to answer his question as he came into view.

 

Shitty raised his eyebrows and nodded, doing that weird white people smile-frown. “Lards, you uh,” he started, shifting his sunglasses down his nose so he could look at her over their tops. He cleared his throat and pushed his glasses back up on his face. Fighting back a grin, he shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back onto his heels. “You lose a wrestling match to a shit monster?”

 

She lobbed the ball directly at his face.

 

* * *

 

Camp Green Lake was a mostly pleasant kind of place. There was the lake, obviously, misnamed, but objectively still fun. There was a giant water trampoline anchored maybe twenty yards out. Markus, the old yet enthusiastic head counselor, told Shitty and Lardo in nauseating detail about the time one camper had gone on the trampoline even though he had the runs after winning the annual hot dog eating contest. 

 

“It was lucky,” Markus said, “that we had a wild summer storm the very next day. Practically a typhoon. Cleaned the whole thing right off.” Then he walked away, calm and cool as ever. 

 

Shitty turned to Lardo, a contemplative look on his face. He sucked in a deep breath, puffing out his chest. “Yeah, I’m still gonna fucking jump on it,” he declared proudly.

 

Lardo patted his shoulder and nodded reassuringly. “Wouldn’t expect anything less from ya, Shits.”

 

The camp catered to fourteen to sixteen year-olds, so of course they said “fuck” even more often (though with less finesse) than Shitty did. The original plan had been for Shitty to go by Knight, leaving plenty of room for riffing on nicknames, but Lardo slipped up once (just once, okay?) in front of two campers and the name spread like wildfire. Markus shrugged it off, as unfazed as ever. He just took a Sharpie from his pocket and crossed out Shitty’s name tag, scrawling “Shitty” above the blacked out name. For some reason, though, no matter how many times Shitty called Lardo by her “correct name,” all the campers called her “Larissa.”

 

“It’s the power of a name tag, bro,” she’d tried to explain to him one night in the chow hall. 

 

“Well, why the fuck didn’t  _ my _ name tag have that power?” he demanded, gesturing dangerously with his sloppy joe. 

Lardo leaned back to avoid a stray chunk of meat that flew through the air. “Your name has more power than your tag, I guess.” She shrugged, turning back to her own slightly soggy sandwich. “The universe rejected your other name, so you had to change the tag to match the cosmos.”

 

The chow hall sat in the center of a ring of cabins, which each housed eight campers and one counselor. Each cabin had its own tiny bathroom with a toilet, sink, and miniscule stall shower. Lardo had insisted on finding a camp with running water, and shitty had agreed easy enough that she suspected that was higher on his priority list than he let on. The cabins had four sets of bunk beds for the campers, and a small room off the side to give the counselors some privacy. 

 

“It’d be even more private if the counselors had their own cabin,” Lardo had grumbled at the beginning of the summer. But she learned. Oh, she learned. 

 

Lardo had never gone to summer camp herself. It was too expensive. If she was going to ask her family for something special, then it would be paints or modeling clay, not weeks away from home spent scratching mosquito bites. So she was unfamiliar with the longstanding tradition of camp pranks. 

 

That’s why she brushed off Markus’s reasoning behind not putting all the counselors in one cabin: “Then we’d be the target for all the pranks.” 

 

She’d shrugged, not impressed. She could handle pranks. Pranks, she understood. She was the manager of an NCAA men’s hockey team, for fuck’s sake. Shoe checks and loosened water bottle tops and hidden gear, that was all familiar territory.

 

But camp pranks.

 

Camp pranks were another level.

 

It started out simple enough. The campers in one cabin TPed Shitty’s cabin in the middle of the night. No one would admit which cabin was actually responsible for it, but Lardo had her money on Darius’s cabin. The soft-spoken anthropology major had gotten stuck with a group of boisterous boys who were all the oldest in the camp. A few days after Shitty’s cabin had been hit, Lardo saw one of Darius’s campers walking out of the chow hall bathroom with three rolls of toilet paper, obviously looking to restock without getting caught. She told Shitty her theory and he agreed that it was mighty suspicious, and his campers were already planning a way to get the culprits back.

 

That’s why it came as a shock when she woke up the next morning to find her cabin’s windows completely blacked out with shaving cream.

 

“What the fuck?” she cried, gesturing up at the windows as she stood in front of the cabin in her pajamas. “What the fuck is this?!”

 

“I think it’s shaving cream,” Adara, one of her youngest campers whispered.

 

_ Thank you, Captain Obvious _ . Fighting back the urge to yell even more profanities at the poor, innocent girl, Lardo stomped across the quad to bang her fist on the door of Shitty’s cabin. 

 

A lanky fifteen year-old named Ernesto answered the door. He was a good six inches taller than her, but shrank back at the look in her eyes. 

 

“Get Shitty,” she commanded through clenched teeth, and he raced to obey. Shitty swaggered out to the door in moose-patterned boxers (even he wasn’t going to walk around naked in front of a bunch of minors). 

 

“How can I help you this fine morning, ma’am?” shitty crooned, leaning up against the doorway.

 

Fuming, Lardo just scowled back at him. She pointed a finger at him menacingly. “You’ve got a target on your back, now, Shits,” she warned him, flipping her hand around to give him the bird.

 

Shitty laughed wholeheartedly, throwing his head back. “Let the games begin, Lards.”

 

Lardo filled her campers in on the whole situation: Darius’s cabin and their treachery, and now Shitty’s double-crossing. “Now, I can’t do anything about it,” she told them, huddled together on one of the bottom bunks. “But you can.”

 

“Now, don’t you worry about it, Miss Larissa,” Zoie drawled. She was from Charleston and reminded Lardo so much of Bitty it made her heart hurt. “We’ll take care of all of that for you.” The other campers nodded their assent, murmuring that they’d get those cocky boys. Get them good.

 

So for the next week and a half, Larissa pretended that she did not notice her campers snagging extra tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shaving cream from the supply closet. She pretended she did not see them pocket a full jar of glitter during arts and crafts. She pretended she did not hear her campers discussing the best methods of picking locks. And she definitely pretended not to hear them sneak out of the cabin late at night. 

 

She woke in the morning well-rested and ready to start the day. And, oh the day was starting. The day was starting with the confused shouts of not one, but two cabins full of boys. One voice rose above the rest. 

 

“Lardo!” Shitty called. 

 

She pretended not to hear that, either, at least for a little while. Taking her time to get dressed for the day, Lardo hummed to herself as she listened to campers laughing and arguing back and forth. When she finally exited her cabin, she was greeted by the glorious sight of campers from Shitty’s and Darius’s cabins standing in the quad in the pjs, variously decorated with toothpaste, shaving cream, and glitter. 

 

“What is this?” Shitty demanded, gesturing at the pandemonium around him. His own mustache was flaked with toothpaste, suggesting that he’d already scraped his surprise off. 

 

Lardo looked around her, as calm as could be. She was impressed. Her kids had done good work. Some of the campers had elaborate mustaches of toothpaste sprinkled with glitter. Others had intricate hairstyles created from shaving cream, most of the with the back or side ripped off from when they took their heads off their pillows. Some of the unfortunate souls who’d gone to sleep shirtless had messages written in toothpaste that looked to have been mixed with glitter before application. One read, “1D 5ever,” while another spelled out “loser” in various languages. 

 

Raising her eyebrows, Lardo turned back to Shitty and said, “Looks like the circus is in town.” Leaving him fuming, she turned back to her cabin, giving her campers a smile that no one else could see. 

 

“Oh, just you wait, Miss Larissa,” Zoie told her, a smile creeping up her face. “Just you keep waiting. They haven’t found everything yet.” Lardo high-fived her on her way back inside the cabin.

 

Later, when they were all sitting down for lunch, Lardo noticed Shitty off to the side, sitting on the bench right outside the door. He frowned down at his sneakers, untying the laces on one. He pulled it off in a cloud of sparkles. “What the fuck?” he exclaimed. Glitter continued to pour out of his shoe as he dumped it upside down. His entire sock was coated in shimmering flakes of gold. Bewildered, he set his shoe down and started working on the other one. 

 

By now, the entire chow hall was howling with laughter. Lardo carried her tray of food past the table her campers shared, slowing down to look at them over the tops of her sunglasses. “You filled his shoes with glitter?” she asked. They nodded gleefully. “Nice.”

 

* * *

 

Working with the kids wasn’t all fun and games. One of the older boys made the grave mistake of calling one of the opposing team members a “cocksucker” during a particularly rowdy game of camp-wide dodgeball. In front of Shitty.

 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, little dude,” Shitty bellowed loud enough to pause the game around them. “Would you ever in your life,” he started, dropping his voice down low just to speak to the offender, “like to….” Perhaps remembering that he was in fact talking to a child, Shitty paused before finishing his sentence in the most awkward way Lardo had ever heard him talk about anything sex-related: “be on the receiving end of oral sex?”

 

The teen, unfortunately named Chad, his name tag revealed, scoffed at Shitty and insisted, “I already have.” 

 

“Alright.” Shitty crossed his arms over his chest. Chad’s face made it clear that he’d been hoping Shitty would be impressed, and so it fell when he instead asked, “Was it from a boy or a girl?”

 

“Dude, what the fuck?” Chad sputtered, looking around at the other campers near him. When Shitty merely raised his eyebrows, he answered, “A girl.”

 

Shitty raised his hands in front of himself defensively. “I’m not going to participate in your heteronormativity, man. Had to ask.” Clearing his throat, he took his sunglasses off and placed them on top of his head. “So, did you call her a ‘cocksucker’?”

 

“What? Of course not,” Chad sputtered. 

 

“Right,” Shitty agreed. “Because, to  _ you _ , ‘cocksucker’ is an insult. And you wouldn’t want to insult someone who’s just done you an enormous favor.” Placing his hands on his hips in a move Lardo vowed to never stop chirping him for, Shitty gave Chad his most serious stare. “But using ‘cocksucker’ as an insult, especially about a man, is incredibly homophobic. You don’t have a problem with a girl going down on you. But you’d have a problem with a guy going down on another guy?”

 

Chad blushed beet red. “No,” he said lamely. “I’m not a homophobe. I’m from  _ Boston _ .”

 

“Being form Boston isn’t always a guarantee, my dude,” Shitty sighed. “Stop using homophobic language,” he told him, the reprimand clear in his voice.

 

Chad nodded back, his mouth in a tight frown. One of the youngest campers, who’d watched the whole exchange with wide eyes, slowly raised his hand.

 

“Blake, you—you don’t have to, um,” Shitty stuttered, trying not to laugh. “You don’t have to raise your hand.”

 

Blake lowered his hand just as slowly. “Um,” he started, clearly nervous. “Mr. Shitty? What’s heteronormativity?” 

 

This inevitably lead to Shitty sitting the entire camp down right then and there to give them a condensed, swear-filled overview of every WGSS course he’d ever taken. 

 

* * *

The end of the summer brought tearful farewells. Camp Green Lake gave all the campers t-shirts (white, of course) and Sharpies. All the kids ran around the quad, signing each other’s t-shirts. Each of Lardo’s campers asked her to sign theirs as well, and she drew each of them a cartoon version of themselves. Word got around that Lardo was pretty good with a pen, and she spent the rest of the day drawing on t-shirts. 

 

When the last of the campers was picked up, Lardo walked over to Shitty, shaking out her hand. “You turned into Little Miss Popular at the end there, didn’t you?” Shitty asked, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. 

 

Lardo shook her head. “I gotta learn how to say ‘no,’” she said ruefully.

 

“Nah, you can never say no to kids,” Shitty drawled, craning his neck so that his cheek rested on the top of her head. “You’re a secret softie.”

 

“You’re the softie,” Lardo shot back, poking Shitty in the stomach. 

 

Shitty squawked indignantly and lifted Lardo off of her feet, swinging her around as she laughed. They wrestled with each other for a bit, until Lardo managed to knock Shitty to the ground by hooking a leg behind his knee. He pulled her down on top of him, bracing her fall with arms strong from paddling canoes all summer long. She might tease him about going soft without the intense hockey training, but he was still never going to let her fall.

 

Looking down at him, Lardo was hit with the sense of an ending all over again. Graduation had been rough. She’d had to say goodbye to Jack  _ and  _ Shitty. In her head, she knew they’d be close by. But they’d be busy. Jack would be playing eighty-two games with the Providence Falconers, most of them on the road. Shitty would be studying and going to classes and doing internships and studying and studying and studying. They wouldn’t be just down the hall from her anymore. It wouldn’t be the same.

 

“Hey, Lards, don’t,” Shitty whispered, rolling her off of him so he could sit up next to her. He slung his arms around her, pulling her close. “It’s not the end for us.”

 

“I know,” Lardo sniffled. She leaned her head onto his shoulder. “But it won’t be the same.”

 

“It’ll be better,” Shitty said with such finality that Lardo couldn’t help but believe him.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> So excited to participate in OMGCP Reverse Bang 2019! Check out the amazing artwork that inspired this story and give the amazing Jane some love at smhloudboy on tumblr. I'm 3-c-i-a on tumblr if you want to come rage about hockey, Check Please, and many other unrelated things!


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